Tag Archives: K-12 Education

When Plagiarism Isn’t Plagiarism, When Teachers Are Assholes

11 Thursday Feb 2021

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, race, Youth

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A gas pilot light (what gaslighting and other weaponized behaviors can feel like when one’s on receiving end), February 11, 2021. (https://generalparts.com/)

I have been truly miffed and hurt before. But not like this. At least, not since my senior year of high school and my first year as a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon. But it is for my 17-year-old son that I am feeling this pain, this anger that ebbs, but doesn’t quite go away. It is apparent to me that so many teachers and staff in K-12 education are operating without a net with a pandemic all around them — and making the most of their ability to make life easier for their students anyway.

But there are others for whom the pandemic and all that has come with it literally means “students should just work as normal” or “even more than normal,” because they are “at home.” I already have colleagues at American University who think that they can take their 2.5-hour block classes and do what they did before the pandemic, lecturing for two hours at a time without giving students breaks, even assigning more work. I didn’t think I’d learn of the same stubbornness to adapt from high school teachers, too.

This story is one about my son’s struggles with school this year and off and on over the past few years. But it is also very much about how a high school in East Silver Spring, Maryland can let even a slightly above average student slip through the cracks, and then punish him, once noticed. It is about how teachers and administrators can circle the wagons like the NYPD or any other “blue wall of silence” police institution and gaslight the parents of such a child when confronted about how they have neglected and abused this child academically. My educated guess as an educator is that this issue with our own kid can easily be multiplied by a factor of a couple thousand across Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS), and by hundreds of thousands in the 14,000 school districts across the US.

The story begins with our son in his senior year in a virtual remote learning environment, with some teachers (like his Creative Writing teacher) offering flexibility with due dates and other concerns, and other teachers (like his gym teacher and honors 12th grade English teacher), not so much. Our son has had his ups and downs throughout his high school years, but still was roughly a 3.0 or so student through his first three years. Even with the pandemic setting in last spring, he managed three As in his core courses. His combination of anxiety, social isolation, and (at times) inattention and laziness kept him from doing as well as he likely could’ve those years.

With schools in virtual remote mode for at least the first half of his senior year, we expected it to be pretty rough for our son. But not this rough. It seemed as if MCPS flipped a switch, and as a rule expected teachers, administrators, students, and parents to carry on this 2020-21 school year as if everything was normal. Daily attendance checks, more homework piled on top of homework, constant testing, points off for any late assignments, all part of the normal and toxic routine of rote discipline in the Common Core era.

And so it was for our son. In his gym class, his teacher marked him absent at least three times on days he opened his Zoom more than five (5) minutes past his start time. In the first three weeks, our son switched from Anatomy, Marine Biology, and Calculus to Creative Writing and Intro to Statistics, putting him behind in his courses overall.

But by the end of the first month, of all the classes, we did not expect honors English to be an issue. He had been taking honors English classes since seventh grade, after all. His honors English teacher for the first half of 12th grade, though, was not impressed with our son’s work. Even his A+ work:

You need to be more specific here. There is way to much generalization and because of that lack of specificity you kind of repeat the same ideas over and over again.

…you really didn’t follow the layout that we reviewed in class for this narrative. You need to show and not tell. Use a scene to demonstrate the theme rather than just telling the reader what they should know.

A little more detail as to the character and the setting would have been helpful here.  This goes back to the “show don’t tell” conversations we’ve had about the project.

I’d like to hear a little more discussion with the group next time – that’s what I am assessing.

Because I have electronic access to our son’s assignments, grades, and comments, I read these off and on throughout his months with this honors English teacher. I figured that our son wasn’t quite doing his best work. But then again, who would be these days? I was busy grading my own students and their papers. Although I thought this teacher’s commentary was a bit tough, I assumed it was because our son kept making the same errors again and again.

Until I started reading his assignments and answers in more detail. Even when our son understood the assignment or essay and showed understanding, it was never enough for his honors English teacher. The last quote in the string above was about an assignment in which this teacher had assigned a perfect score. That was in December, just before the holiday break.

I emailed his honors English teacher, in fact, all of our son’s other 12th grade teachers and his counselor at that point. I wrote that we “fully understand your frustrations with [our child], and share them as well.” We asked for them to keep a look out for him, to not let him “blend into the background.” Notice that we did not say that we condoned this teacher’s frustrations or his “terse language” toward our child. Nor did we say to give him a grade he doesn’t deserve. We simply wanted the flexibility that any of us would want in the middle of a pandemic, in the midst of death (including the death of his grandmother at the beginning of December), on top of his ongoing issues with sleeplessness and anxiety.

Instead, our son’s honors English teacher became more frustrated, and never addressed us as his parents directly in response to my email. It all came to a head on our son’s last assignment, an essay on satire. Apparently the teacher expected our son to roll with one example on satire and point to how many methods of satire this one example checks off. Instead, our son used four examples, and went through those methods with those examples. In the end, the teacher scored it a 50/100.

At first, I really wasn’t that surprised, given our son’s history with this teacher. But then, in the middle of his comments, the teacher wrote:

As for the elements of satire that you explore, in order to address sarcasm you must include the term irony in order to fully demonstrate your understanding of the device- you also don’t give specific examples.  A caricature is a satirical device but the example you give is not satire, it’s racist.

That was when I read the essay. What our son wrote was meandering, not well organized, but not exactly a disheveled mess either. It was pretty middle-of-the-road, like he wrote it in a rush (given the state of things, I’m certain he wrote it at the last minute). But it did contain a thesis, a mediocre and incomplete one, yet I clearly knew his topic and some of what he intended to cover just from reading it. He addressed the issue of irony in his second paragraph, and went on in detail to describe it in his fifth paragraph. The racism charge was ridiculous, given that our son had immediately pointed out that caricatures of groups like Jews were historical “stereotypes” as part of his essay. Plus, the nerve of this man to write, “I really wish I could’ve done more to help. With this assignment in particular I can help you with these types of essays- that help will prepare you for college if that’s the route you’re thinking of taking.” Tone deaf, with -isms and assumptions at his educator core.

I emailed our son’s honors English teacher, again, this time to ask him to take a second look, to note what our son did correctly in his essay, not just what our son didn’t do. Based on this teacher’s own rubric and nearly three decades of teaching students between 13 and 80 years old, our son’s score should’ve been between a 70 and a 79.

Instead, the teacher doubled down and accused our son of plagiarism, which was now the real reason for his score. My guess was that the teacher deliberately found another weakness in his essay, once confronted by me via email. He offered, though, to knock our’s son’s score up to 66/100, even though this wouldn’t change our son’s grade in the course.

I had to really, really contain myself in my follow-up email. As a father and an educator, I know all the tricks that teachers and professors use to get students and/or parents off their backs. But plagiarism is a very serious charge, the kind that requires evidence, and not mere accusation. That, and the fact that our son’s honors English teacher had not mentioned plagiarism, not at all, until I confronted him about our son’s grade and his unsubstantiated commentary.

I called for a conference with the teacher, our son’s counselor, the English Department chair, and (if available), our son’s 12th grade principal. I did it having already read our son’s essay, and having run it through Turnitin.com myself. Nine-tenths of the assignment was in our son’s own words. The other 10 percent? Parts of three sentences — about 55 words in all — included definitions that our son had not put quotes around. Two others had links to sources, ones our son clearly identified as sources. Inconsistent citing of sources, something I deal with from my own students so often it barely raises an eyebrow. It would have been enough for me to take off some additional points, but it is not a plagiarism offense.

As expected, the conference call that was supposed to be about the honors English teacher’s ill-treatment of and accusations toward our son was really an exercise in gaslighting him and us as his parents with the plagiarism accusation. Expected, but very disappointing. They kept telling us that our son was lucky to have not received a 0 and failing grade in the course. I said that they should be ashamed of themselves as educators, that they were “circling the wagons” like law enforcement. Our son’s honor’s English teacher said nothing for 35 minutes, and kept playing his TV in the background, which kept cutting in and out throughout the call (what a coward!). He was the only person on the call who didn’t speak.

They offered to share their so-called evidence. The “evidence” was exactly the same as when I ran our son’s essay through Turnitin the week before. If this is plagiarism, I would dare say three-quarters of the students I’ve taught since 1992 should be accused of such. MCPS’s definition of plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty? It includes the key phrase, “the willful giving or receiving” of an academic advantage of some sort, meaning the act has to be an intentional one. It can’t just be a couple of citation errors; evidence of intent must be involved. The wanton theft of other’s words must be involved. I seriously doubt three partial sentences in an average essay granted our son any “advantage” at all (having been a victim of plagiarism myself, I know the signs).

They did so much terribly wrong here, to our son, and to us as our son’s parents. They cared not about the teacher’s escalation of comments to our son. They cared not that the other accusations proved to be false. They cared only about three sets of quotation marks missing from a 900-word essay. They cared only about this, because they knew they could do nothing institutionally that would help students struggling with the pandemic. They cared only about the accusation because K-12 institutions care more about protecting a mediocre White male teacher than they do about Black and Brown students, as these institutions are racist and ableist to their core.

Luckily, our son has a different honors English teacher this semester, his final one at his Silver Spring high school. But as damaging as this could have been for him, at least I can say I stepped up as his dad, right? Except that this has conjured up lots of bad memories about the assholes who were my administrators at Mount Vernon HS, about folks whom I’ve known to be assholes in the education field over the years. Given this, why would anyone want to see these toxic sites of social control open up again for in-person instruction? I don’t.

I had thought about volunteering at our son’s high school this semester, with a smaller teaching load at my institutions this spring. But after this, why in hell would I want to volunteer with these uncaring shits who call themselves educators? They can all kiss my middle-aged Black ass!

However, if our son, a slightly above-average student, had to endure the bullshit of a bullshit-artist-as-certified-teacher, I can only imagine the number students across the achievement spectrum who are catching hell from teachers who have not adjusted well to teaching virtually in the midst of this pandemic. So maybe, just maybe, once I stop thinking about putting our son’s former teacher in a chokehold, I’ll see about volunteering once more. 

But, even if everyone at our son’s soon-to-be-former high school is vaccinated by late this spring or by Fall 2021, I’m still wearing two masks and a face shield. The place is way too toxic for us.

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I truly would like to hear from parents, students, even teachers, in Silver Spring, in Montgomery County, MD, in the DMV, in general. Tell me I’m wrong, that these aren’t examples of education as punitive and gaslighting. Or, conversely, tell me if you have had similar experiences with this high school and this school district, especially since the pandemic.

Mrs. Bryant and the Beginning of Donald 1.5

03 Sunday Jun 2018

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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A bright blue sky, just before the long storm, February 19, 2011. (http://www.photos-public-domain.com). In public domain.

We’ve reached the end of yet another school year, number 32 for me overall, between my twenty-two years between kindergarten and doctorate and my son’s ten years of K-9 (this doesn’t included the 13 years of overlap, in which my primary job has been as an instructor, or my wife’s two years of grad school). The end of sixth grade was not particularly violent. But it was a rough transition to nearly eight years of bumps, bruises, grinding poverty and psychological torture, and a constant struggle for my true self.

The one strong and calming influence in the midst of this gathering storm system was my sixth grade teacher at William H. Holmes ES, Mrs. Della Bryant. She was the fourth of my four Black teachers between first grade and middle school. Mrs. Bryant was as important to me on the cusp of becoming a teenager as Ms. Griffin was to my grounding as a student in first grade, and the crush I had on Mrs. Shannon in third. Because Mrs. Bryant didn’t just aspire for us to do well and get A’s. She wanted us to think big picture, and not just about high school or college. Mrs. Bryant encouraged us to think in larger, worldly terms, to take politics and religion and literature and the stuff of intellectuals seriously.

She indulged us, especially me and my then best friend Starling. So many times that year, Mrs. Bryant allowed us to debate current event topics in class, whether we had sufficient facts or not. The Iran hostage crisis, the 1980 election cycle and why Ronald Reagan would be worse than President Jimmy Carter (no one in our class played devil’s advocate), the legality of Israel unilaterally bombing an Iraqi nuclear weapons centrifuge site.

Those were among the moments I lived for in Mrs. Bryant’s class that school year. I lived for them not just because I liked showing off my knowledge. I already knew I was smart. I spent the following year saying “I am the smartest kid in the whole world!” to myself, and occasionally, to Humanities classmates who made me feel inferior.

No, those debates weren’t about my raw analytic power and great ability to remember. They were about discovering what I thought I knew about a topic, understanding what I didn’t know, and being able to articulate it all without losing my thoughts in the ether. And in all that, I discovered parts of myself. My forthrightness. My New York-style sarcasm. My sense of righteous anger. My ability to summarize a situation in order to derive or intuit possible responses, even solutions.

That was what Mrs. Bryant with her light but steady touch helped me get to in sixth grade. A sense of enlightenment that could survive the false gods of Hebrew-Israelite-ism, the false father of my then idiot stepfather “Judah ben Israel” née Maurice Washington, and the fallacy that I had any control over my world.

But that wasn’t all Mrs. Bryant helped me do that year. She encouraged me to take on other projects, especially contests. Like posters for Dental Health Month, or participating in Election 1980 activities, and journaling and writing down my thoughts about virtually everything. Mrs. Bryant did me the honor of having me introduce our graduation speaker at the end of sixth grade, nearly 37 years ago. It was a two-minute speech, but it was also in front of a couple hundred people. I don’t think I’ve even been as nervous being on radio or television. Most of that stuck with me for years, somehow surviving through years of crumpled neglect.

Mrs. Bryant was the one who shepherded me into the Humanities Program, something that I’d only heard about once before, inadvertently through Brandie Weston (who was a student at Pennington-Grimes) the year before. With my grades and test scores, I probably could’ve made into the Grimes Center a year or two earlier. That is, if my teachers Ms. Pierce and Mrs. O’Daniel had thought of me that way. But in the big scheme, it wasn’t that important. Mrs. Bryant did think of me that way, and went out of her way to say as much. “Mrs. Bryant’s encouragement, her insistence that I was ‘one of the best students’ she ‘ever had,’ made sixth grade a joyful time,” I wrote in my memoir.

Now, despite Mrs. Bryant, I wasn’t prepared for going to school every day with 150 other know-it-all’s, many of whom would never have to worry about Con Edison bills being overdue or having no food to eat for three or four days at time. Or, the constant threat of domestic violence and abuse at home. Heck, between Humanities’ decided demographic affluence and ideological Whiteness, I doubt that most of my eventual classmates worried about anything other than getting A’s until puberty took full hold.

As I wrote in Boy @ The Window, “Mrs. Bryant never warned me that Humanities would be overwhelming because my social skills outside of Holmes were as well developed as a spoiled seven-year old’s.” I simply didn’t handle the transition from a 98-percent-Black elementary school to the mostly White Humanities program very well. Then again, with so much going wrong at home, I didn’t handle much of anything well in the 16 months after sixth grade.

But one thing I carried from my year with Mrs. Bryant was that I could survive and succeed despite it all. To observe and listen, and not just speak off the cuff. To be patient, and keep working. Frankly, it was likely because of teachers like Mrs. Bryant that I discovered my first superpower, my ability to think, remember, and write. And in that discovery, bury the pains of earlier abuses that would’ve surely killed me (or at least, led to a successful suicide) by the time I turned fourteen. Mrs. Bryant, wherever you are, and whatever you’re up to, I say, with love, many, many thanks!

A Private School Future For My Son?

21 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by in 1, Academia, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Universal Orlando, January 8, 2011. (Ian Boichat via Flickr.com). In public domain.

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Universal Orlando, January 8, 2011. (Ian Boichat via Flickr.com). In public domain.

I’ve written so many times already about the state of education reform and how corporate interests via private philanthropy, government conservatism and the technocratic generation have been hell-bent in deforming public education. I’ve even given some glimpses into my own son’s journey through elementary school in Montgomery County, Maryland over the past five years, as they’ve watered-down their curriculum and grading system while ratcheting up their testing regimen. It’s all led me to one conclusion. We need to do something for my 10-year-old son that neither me nor my wife would’ve ever gone through ourselves, especially with middle school a few months away.

The way I see it, we have four choices going into the 2014-15 school year and beyond:

1. Finding a private school for our son to attend, especially for seventh and eighth grade;

2. Finding an appropriate parochial school for our son to attend, especially for seventh and eighth grade;

3. I become a certified home schooler in time for my son’s sixth, seventh and eighth grade experiences, and educate him myself for a year or two;

4. Somehow find work overseas so that my son can get a proper, non-US public education in say, Canada, the UK, even Hong Kong or Cuba at this point.

Gonzaga College High School, Washington, DC, April 12, 2010. (AgnosticPreachersKid via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via Creative Commons.

Gonzaga College High School, Washington, DC, April 12, 2010. (AgnosticPreachersKid via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via Creative Commons.

There are certain drawbacks to all of these options, of course. A good private school in the DC area is a $15,000 per year prospect or more (as much as $30,000 per year at the upper end). And though my son can and sometimes does excel, he’s just a slightly above-average student (at least, according to MSA, MAP-M, MAP-R and a whole bunch of other tests), meaning scholarship money isn’t likely. The past two years of constant testing have sucked the joy of learning out of my kid’s memory banks. The only reason he reads at home at all is because we make him, not because he’s bought into the idea of reading and the world of imagination that it connects to. Not exactly the way to glide in for a tour of a school in Bethesda, Chevy Chase or DC.

With parochial schools, though definitely within our budget, the question becomes how much constant retraining would we have to do on the religious side. We’re non-denominational Christians, and ones would do not regularly go to church, either. Between the Catholic and Jewish schools, it could get confusing for our school. Yes, I know that they’ve become more secular since my days in K-12, but it does beg the question of whether we’d be trading in one set of endless headaches for another. On the other hand, going to a parochial school’s still likely better than a constant battery of tests for students-turned-lab-rats.

I’ve given homeschooling a lot of thought. It would be a piece of cake for the state to certify me. But it would reduce my income, already up and down since I became an adjunct professor and part-time consultant five years ago. It would curtail my ability to find new and additional work, as my days would be filled with teaching my son myself. Heck, my son might resent not being around kids his own age after a couple of months! But a year of homeschooling from me might be all my son needs. I have the potential to do in one year what my son’s public education couldn’t do in three. Especially if I could resuscitate his joy for learning.

What about finding work that would allow us to escape America’s badly damaged public education system? Sure, but I’d be (and am) competing with folks who already live in Canada, the UK and Hong Kong (among other places). My skills include teaching US, African American and World History and grad courses in Education Foundations, writing articles and books and a decade as a nonprofit manager. Unique, but not so in-demand and so unique that Canadians would beat down my door to hire me just because of my skills. Yet, all it takes is finding one job, one position overseas that could change all of our life trajectories.

A student fast asleep, or the future with Common Core, December 21, 2013. (http://www.medicalxpress.com).

A student fast asleep, or the future with Common Core, December 21, 2013. (http://www.medicalxpress.com).

With all of that, it appears that these are all better choices than sticking with Montgomery County Public Schools for the next seven years. The Common Core — really, the Common Snore of killing students’ imaginations, teachers’ autonomy and the attempt at critical thinking all at once — has arrived. And it is truly a not-so-silent death knell to public education as a vehicle for social change or social justice. So we need to make some life-altering choices, not the kind our federal and state governments and local school boards provide. And we need to make them soon.

Grad School & My Most Special Summer Reading List

31 Saturday Aug 2013

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Just a small sample of the books I read/re-read summer before grad school in 1991, August 31, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

Just a small sample of the books I read/re-read summer before grad school in 1991, August 31, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

For me, August 28 this week was significant for any number of reasons. It wasn’t just that it was fifty years to the exact day and date that the March on Washington occurred and MLK gave his “I Have A Dream” speech. Or that is was fifty-eight years to the date that White supremacists lynched Emmett Till for allegedly whistling at some flat-butt White girl. This past Wednesday was also twenty-two years to the day and date that I began my first day of graduate school as a master’s student in the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of History.

Of course, I didn’t discuss this earlier this week (it would’ve been incredibly arrogant on my part to bring this up three days ago). My big steps for myself were infinitesimal when in measured comparison to the beginning of the two-year height of the official Civil Rights Movement. But even on an afternoon in which I attended my first course and meeting about teaching/advising assignments for the semester, it did feel like a bit of a triumph. Especially when considering what I had to do that spring and summer to get into the program with funding in the first place.

I didn’t learn that much that day. Except the low contempt Joe White and some of the other professors held toward pedagogy and teaching. “You already know more than your students,” White said as advice to us who’d be TAs that semester. I was lucky to not be among them for my first year. I was a GSA assisting in the advising of history majors, some of whom were my fellow undergrads just a few months before. But even then, I thought two minutes’ worth of advice on viewing students as empty vessels was insufficient training for learning how to lecture and facilitate conversations with upwards of 100 students spread out over several discussion sections each week.

I had other things on my mind at that moment, though, including the relief that I’d survived a summer making $5.20 per hour as a full-time employee with a Western Psychiatric Institute & Clinic project in which the project investigators were far more psychotic than the patients. Aside from that, I thought about how the previous four months had served as my preparation for the White world of grad school.

I’d done a lot of reading that late spring and summer, spurned on by boredom, disappointment in my weirdly evolving friendship with Elaine, and a sense that I needed to read to fortify myself against the neo-Marxists in my eventual field. So I read. I started off with Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), believe it or not, the first time I’d ever read it. Like so many before me, it made my views of the man less black and white than it had been before. I then picked up W. E. B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk (1903), the first time I’d read that book since I wrote a book report on it for Mrs. O’Daniel’s class in fifth grade. Unsurprisingly, I got much more out of it in May ’91 than I did in May ’80.

I didn’t stop there, as my reading took me on three different tracks in June, July and August. One was the “I didn’t get to read this before” track, as I read Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, Song of Solomon and Beloved (didn’t understand it then, and still don’t get the big deal about it now). Along with Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (1969), bell hooks and several others on Black Women’s literature. Then, I decided to go back and reread some James Baldwin and Richard Wright that I’d first read for high school, and added Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) to the mix. On the non-literature track, I ended up reading Franz Fanon, Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction (1935) — at least, I put a significant dent in it — Derrick Bell’s And We Are Not Saved (1987), and other writings on Black history and culture (broadly speaking).

But the third track would end up taking me on a path toward my dissertation topic and my first book, Fear of a “Black” America (2004). It started with articles on multicultural education that took me to James Banks’ theoretic constructions of what multicultural education ought to have been, but wasn’t. I also found myself reading books like Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities (1991), Molefi Asante’s The Afrocentric Idea (1987), Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education (completely indecipherable in a circular firing squad of a thesis kind of way) and Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-education of the Negro (1933). I was reading anything that could inform my thinking about K-12 and higher education and how it played the role as both equalizer and oppressor for so many Black folks over the years.

It was easily the most reading I’d done on my own since the year before I’d gone into seventh grade, middle school and the Humanities Program. I wanted to read all I wanted to read before spending the next few years drowning my brain in hundreds of books and articles that I’d absolutely need to read as a historian. In the process, I may’ve radicalized myself a bit for the otherwise hum-drum experience of reading mind-numbing accounts of history in which the authors didn’t seem to see their own sense of high-brow White maleness.

And with all of it, I surprised myself. I realized once again that my Black classmates and 616 neighbors were wrong about me not being Black enough. Their “Black” wasn’t my “Black,” of course. But all those books confirmed for me that there were many ways to be Black that folks who didn’t read could barely understand.

How High-Stakes Testing Strangles Motivation and Competition

31 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Homer strangles Bart (again), The Simpsons, February 2011. (http://www.goodwp.com/).

Homer strangling Bart (again), The Simpsons, February 2011. (http://www.goodwp.com/).

One of the biggest casualties in the current K-12 education reform effort — otherwise known as measuring teacher effectiveness through high-stakes testing — is the notion of competition, academic and otherwise. At least, students competing to make themselves better students, better athletes and even better people in the process of matriculating through elementary, middle and high school. Competition suffers when the teaching, motivational, psychological and financial resources necessary to level the K-12 playing field have gone instead to testing companies and psychometricians.

So much has been the emphasis on testing and raising test scores that most in education reform now think competition among students on the K-12 stage is an abomination that must be rooted out, and not part and parcel of the learning and human development process. This is really too bad. For what often makes school fun for children is a healthy dose of competition throughout the process.

To use myself and my ten-year-old son as but two examples of what has occurred in K-12 education reform over the past three and a half decades, it is apparent to most educators how much has changed as a result of the fear of competition and lack of autonomy to motivate students. Testing, of course, was part of my educational experience growing up. From third grade through sixth grade in Mount Vernon, New York’s public schools, the school district tested us with the SRA (Science Research Associates, Inc.) exam in reading comprehension and mathematics every spring. At the end of the school year, we’d learn how well or not so well we tested in these areas in terms of grade level.

Data mining (one of the hallmarks of reduced teacher autonomy), cropped and edited, September 2006. (http://www.qualitydigest.com).

Data mining (one of the hallmarks of reduced teacher autonomy), cropped and edited, September 2006. (http://www.qualitydigest.com).

The Mount Vernon Board of Education used the test for two purposes. One, it was a diagnostic exam, as it would show students with reading and math comprehension skills at, above or below grade level. When I took the SRA in third grade, for example, I read at the 3.9 grade level, or on par as a third marking period third-grader. When I took the fourth grade version of the SRA the following year, I had jumped up to a 7.4 in reading, or the equivalent of a mid-year seventh-grader.

The district used the SRA for a second purpose, though, at least by the end of sixth grade. It was part of a package that determined what academic track a student would take as they moved on to middle school. In my case, my straight A’s and my SRA scores (which put me at the 12th grade level in reading comprehension and 11th grade level in math) put me in the gifted-track magnet program called Humanities in 1981. For some of my elementary school classmates, it meant general education classes, or, in a couple of cases, remedial or special education classes.

Ability tracking through an examination and grades over four years has its own sinister flaws in terms of race and class — it has tended to disadvantage Black students, especially poor Black kids. But it at least wasn’t the constant mantra of testing that millions like my ten-year-old son has faced since he began kindergarten in August 2008. For nearly every year, my son has taken a school-level, county-district level, or state-level exam in Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools, including MAP-M and MAP-R, TerraNova and the MSA assessments. What’s more, teachers have administered practice versions of these exams (including unit guides and what they call formatives) about once every six weeks during the school year since my son began second grade.

The constant testing would be meaningful if teachers could get together and decide at the classroom level how best to address students’ needs in areas like reading comprehension and mathematics. These determinations now are tightly controlled at the state, district and school leadership levels, leaving teachers with little room to use their abilities to, well, teach. Really, motivating students — the most critical tool a teacher has in challenging students to become better learners — has become a secondary tool. Especially since these test scores only count in favor or against individual teachers and individual schools, and not specifically for or against students.

Robot teaching math 3d illustration, July 31, 2013. (http://www.123rf.com).

Robot teaching math 3d illustration, July 31, 2013. (http://www.123rf.com).

The last piece is a good thing. Most educators now agree that ability grouping or tracking has fostered too much competition for a school district’s resources among students, teachers, administrators and parents. K-12 education reform has leaned so far the other way, though, that teachers have virtually no say in the curriculum from which they teach, even in kindergarten, and have little from which to motivate their students as learners. In fact, teachers and school-level administrators are the only ones with some motivation and sense of competition, as dollars and jobs are at stake every spring as a result of annual testing. This motivation, though, is all about teaching students how to get better test scores, and not about actual learning, development or academic improvement, a poor way to reform K-12 education.

And it is the motivation to learn that sparks the competition necessary for students to improve themselves, to work with each other to become better students. Another student’s success can even encourage other students to work harder, to make themselves better academically, athletically or even socially. In the current K-12-as-laboratory-experiment-environment, this theme of motivation and healthy competition leading to student success is not only missing. For reformers, it’s been deliberately omitted, as if poor kids and students of color in urban environments don’t need motivation and competition to become better students and people.

Harold Meltzer Appreciation Day

21 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Youth

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MVHS AP US History/Mock Trial Team visit to Mount Vernon's City Hall with Harold Meltzer and Frank Pandolfo, March 18, 1986. (Frank Pandolfo).

MVHS AP US History/Mock Trial Team visit to Mount Vernon’s City Hall with Harold Meltzer and Frank Pandolfo, March 18, 1986. (Frank Pandolfo).

Today marks twenty eight years (both day and date — the ’13 calender and the ’85 calendar are in the same sequence) since the end of tenth grade for the Class of ’87. It’s also the day that fourteen of us met Harold Meltzer in “Room 275 of the Mount Vernon High School” for the first time. We were a grumpy bunch that third Friday in June, having gone through days of Regents exams and other tests from a rather underwhelming (though well-meaning) group of teachers. Again, it’s all in Boy @ The Window. But because I’ve had some experience teaching high school students, not to mention AP reader and ETS (Educational Testing Service, the exam developers) consulting experience, my appreciation for Meltzer has grown over the years.

In all, I’ve given up forty-five days of my life to scoring AP US and World History essays over the years, in the not-so-nice towns of Louisville, Kentucky, Fort Collins, Colorado, Salt Lake City (not to mention Princeton and from my own home). Scoring exams in a factory-esque setting is about as appealing as being an antibiotic-infused chicken at a Tyson’s egg-laying factory in Arkansas. Aside from the long hours of sitting around reading documents-based question essays, comparative essays, other essays and listening to long discussions of rubrics and accuracy in “meeting the standard” for scoring exams, it’s a blast. Especially with all of the coughing, sneezing and farting that can be heard throughout the week!

AP logo, The College Board, June 21, 2013. (http://www.stjacademy.org/).

AP logo, The College Board, June 21, 2013. (http://www.stjacademy.org/).

But the one thing I’ve learned is that many of America’s best and brightest students have significant reading, writing and analyzing issues, and not just because AP exam essay questions are written to be deliberately opaque. I’ve scored about 3,500 essays for the AP folks in all, and I can honestly say I’ve never read more than ten in any session that would’ve been A-level material in any of my college courses (or when I’ve taught high school students, for that matter). My last AP read, every one of the nearly 800 essays I read made my eyeballs ache and my teeth grind.

Most of these essays lack an introduction, a thesis statement, organization of ideas, examples that provide evidence of understanding or analysis, transition sentences between paragraphs and main ideas, and a conclusion. So many students don’t even try. They spend three hours drawing, journaling, writing short stories, poems and haikus, quoting rap lyrics and theme songs, or write in detail about their terrible AP US or World History teacher.

My pretend version of an introduction to a documents-based question essay for AP World History (in my best-worst handwriting), June 21, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

My pretend version of an introduction to a documents-based question essay for AP World History (in my best-worst handwriting), June 21, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

Aside from the almost indecipherable handwriting, that’s what has bothered me most in scoring these essays. That there are tens of thousands of unlucky students out their who by virtue of having a teacher unable to teach US or World History for advanced students. Or worse, teachers who don’t care to find out how best to teach these courses, to teach students how to write a proper introduction and thesis, to teach students how to bring in outside knowledge and intertwine it with documents or other materials within the actual exams. The inability of so many students to draw solid connections and to make a critical examination of the questions that these AP exams pose stems from both teacher neglect (benign and malignant), school districts hungry for ETS and College Board (the latter runs the AP program) dollars, and ETS and the College Board pushing these exams to more and more schools.

That reality makes me still appreciate all that I learned from Meltzer during the 1985-86 school year. Eccentric? Most def. Counterintuitive beyond what was necessary for AP US History? Without a doubt. Strange and somewhat meddlesome compared to our other teachers to be sure. But if any of us paid attention in his class even twenty percent of the time, we not only scored a 3 or better. We learned how to think beyond an answer, to ask “How?” and “Why?” for the first time. We learned how to read for an argument, and not just to read for understanding. We learned how to write a college essay (not just an AP essay) two full years before college.

And all of this learning began this day and date twenty-eight years ago. I can honestly say that I’ve had more than my share of life-changing teachers growing up. Meltzer, though, is at the top of my list, giving the time in which he was my teacher. May he rest in peace.

K-12 Curriculum as a Mystery Novel

02 Thursday May 2013

Posted by in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Unsolved Mysteries, December 19, 2011. (http://news.discovery.com).

Unsolved Mysteries, December 19, 2011. (http://news.discovery.com).

This week, my son will complete a fourth-grade project in which he interviewed his Pittsburgh grandmother about her migration experience from rural Arkansas to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania during the Depression decade. Sounds pretty good — and very advanced — on the surface of things. But the reality of how this school project evolved shows how much has changed — and not for the better — regarding schools and curriculum. For my son’s school in Silver Spring, Maryland, for Montgomery County Public Schools and for schools across the country.

You see, the bulk of testing season is over for MCPS’ elementary schools. So instead of practice tests, formative assessments (otherwise known as “formatives”) and the actual exams (MSA, MAP-M and MAP-R), the teachers now have to focus on lesson plans that aren’t test-driven. For April, the fourth-grade teachers at my son’s school decided to do a social studies project on immigration. They started with a wax museum project at school, as well as a field trip to the Phillips Collection in DC.

This was where things began to get interesting for me as a parent. The permission slip for the field trip presented this unit as immigration. Yet in my son’s trip to the Phillips Collection, him and his classmates would peruse a set of Jacob Lawrence’s paintings on migration. For those of you who don’t know, Lawrence’s most famous paintings were of the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North between roughly 1915 and 1930.

Jacob Lawrence: Migration Series, Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (1993), May 1, 2013. (Elizabeth Hutton Turner; http://ucdavis.libguides.com/).

Jacob Lawrence: Migration Series (Cover Art), Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (1993), May 1, 2013. (Elizabeth Hutton Turner; http://ucdavis.libguides.com/).

I could barely contain the historian side of me when I read such an obvious and unbelievable error. But I decided to not assume that the fourth-grade teachers made the decision to treat immigration the same as migration. So I hand-wrote a note that politely suggested that they make a correction on the permission slip and for the overall assignment, since immigration and migration aren’t the same at all.

This was the response I received by email on April 4:

“We have had this wonderful trip planned for the 4th grade for the past 4 years and we always make sure to front load the students with information about the migration process.”

When teachers go into placating-mode without actually addressing my concerns as a parent (and an educator, for that matter), it’s usually a sign of trouble where there otherwise shouldn’t have been any trouble.

Then, nearly two weeks ago, my son brought home his interview/presentation assignment based on the wax museum project and his Phillips Collection field trip. It was titled “Immigrants in Their Own Words.” The fourth-grade teachers had charged the students — including my son — with the task of finding a family member who had immigrated to the US, interviewing them and asking them questions like “In which year did you come to America?” and “What is the biggest difference between America and your country of origin?”

Flabbergasted is just the beginning of my deep sense of puzzlement over the assignment. It was an assignment straight out of a Facts of Life or Head of the Class episode from the 1980s, culturally and racial insensitive to the core. After all, the height of White immigration to the US ended nearly a century ago. For Blacks, well, if I have to explain it, then it may be worth the while of those of you who do teach to take my History of American Education course (that is, whenever I get to teach it again).

My wife wrote an email about this follow-up assignment, to which my son’s teacher replied, “[e]migration and [i]mmigration are almost splitting hairs.” Really? In what history or ed foundations course? With some prodding, we were given the opportunity to adapt the assignment so that my son could work on migration. Of course, even without that note, I would’ve insisted on him doing migration anyway.

Mysterious...the new Sherlock Holmes, January 17, 2011. (H. Armstrong, Roberts/Corbis; http://www.guardian.co.uk/).

Mysterious…the new Sherlock Holmes, January 17, 2011. (H. Armstrong, Roberts/Corbis; http://www.guardian.co.uk/).

That this process was poorly executed is only part of the story. For nearly five years, my son’s curriculum has been a mystery to me, as it jumped around from pre-algebra to basic addition, from writing letters in which he could write phonetically to having to write about beetles in grammatically correct but short sentences. After five years, my son has never brought a textbook home. The weekly emails from teachers and postings on the neighborhood school website and the MCPS website tell me a lot about nothing.

In sum, I know quite a bit about test dates, subject areas and sometimes subject matter in which the state of Maryland and the school district will test the students. What we don’t know from day one of any school year are the themes for each subject for the year or for any given marking period. Because of the priority of testing above all else, the amount of time in the curriculum on subjects like social studies has narrowed, and with it, a teacher’s ability to be autonomous and to think through curriculum in a critical manner. And without textbooks, I as a parent can’t truly anticipate how to help prepare my son for any new or potentially challenging materials.

It’s difficult, though, to anticipate that your son will come home with an assignment on immigration in the fourth marking period of fourth grade. Especially when I as a history professor know how complicated these processes are for undergraduate and graduate students to wrap their brains around. Especially since my son has yet to write a full-fledged book report on any any book he has read for school. Or spent significant time on history or other, non-test-related subjects. Education should always be a journey, but never a mystery.